


atomic exchange

by owlinaminor



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Intricate Rituals, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: Eddie feels hot all over like a volcano, a real one, like the pictures of Hawaii forming in Stan’sNational Geographic,molten rock spilling up from under the earth and freezing as it hits the ocean.  Steam still rising.Two boys in a hammock, then and now.





	atomic exchange

**Author's Note:**

> me the first time I watched It Chapter Two: okay, that was really sad, but I'm gonna respect the canon and not write fix-it fic  
me the second time I watched It Chapter Two: [actually, you know what, fuck stephen king](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1173370102550540293)
> 
> shoutout to laura for letting me read this aloud to her and telling me it wasn't entirely incoherent.

_July 1989_

Richie’s ten minutes are up.

Eddie knows, he knows they’re up—he doesn’t need a fucking sign, he has a verbal agreement, all seven of them standing in front of the ladder and nodding except for Ben, who was in the back nailing something to the roof, and Bev, who was watching and holding the nails, and Stan, who was setting up a stack of his _National Geographic_ magazines on the bookshelf, and—okay, maybe it was just Richie who was standing in front of the ladder when Eddie said_, ten minutes, we each get ten minutes at a time or we’ll definitely get lice, who knows where that thing’s been,_ but that only helps his point. Richie was there, Richie nodded and said, _whatever, Eds_, and then took a running dive into the hammock, landing with enough force that it almost swung into the wall. And then ten minutes went by with Richie sprawled there, legs hanging out like vines hanging out over a river, just asking to be tugged, and the back of his head knocking against the hammock like a physical underline when he gets to a good part in his comic, and his hands flying up and out like he’s trying to catch invisible spiders before they can fall in his hair. He can’t sit still. He can’t sit still, and Eddie fucking hates him, hates the bright blue of his Hawaiian shirt against the dirty white of the ropes and the pale skin of his legs and the spot of sunburn on the tip of his nose. Knocking his head on the back every minute, swinging out with his legs, pushing off with his shoes against the wall or the nearest pole—and yeah, he’s still fucking wearing _shoes,_ he’s going to get the thing even dirtier than it already is. Richie’s going to break the hammock before Eddie can even sit in it, the way this shit’s going.

He’s going to break the hammock—that’s what Eddie tells himself, that’s why he starts yelling, voice escalating from _my turn_ to _it’s the fucking rule_ and body shooting forward like a bottle rocket until his butt is in the hammock and his feet are in Richie’s face. His sneakers are still on. Both of their sneakers are still on, actually, dirt from the woods and water from the sewers and god knows what from that fucking haunted house all rubbing into the white ropes, probably weakening them, probably this thing is going to drop into the floor before the next ten minutes are up, drop all the way down through to the Earth’s core and then out again on the other side of the world. Eddie wants it. He wants to go. Anything to get him out of his skin, the way it’s always itching, like it knows something he doesn’t.

“I fucked your mom!” Richie yells.

“No you didn’t!” Eddie yells back.

Once in sixth-grade science class, Ms. Fraser said Eddie and Richie were like baking soda and vinegar. Two standard kitchen compounds, perfectly useful on their own, like if you want to make a loaf of bread or some coleslaw for your Fourth of July cookout, but if you pour them in together the sodium something-or-other in the in the baking soda reacts with the acid something-or-other in the vinegar and the whole thing bubbles over. Ms. Fraser did a demonstration in class, said she wanted them to all understand the chemistry behind the phenomenon before half of them made volcanoes for the science fair, but before she could actually do the big vinegar pour, Richie said something stupid and Eddie elbowed him a little too hard and Richie’s head went forward and knocked the beaker off the table, shattering in a spray of silvery bubbles. The class was dismissed early, except for Eddie and Richie, who had to clean up the spill, Richie completely failing to hold the dustpan steady while Eddie carefully swept in every piece of glass, swearing at him the whole way. They had to sit on opposite sides of the room after that, and it was torture. Richie resigned to pulling faces when Eddie was called on, Eddie resigned to scribbling down all of his complaints in the margins of his notes, each word underlined at least twice, then accosting Richie with the full list after class, shouting, _you’re a fucking sit, I mean shit, goddamn it, you’re disgusting_ loud enough that the flow of hallway traffic curved around Richie’s locker in self-defense. Torture.

This is torture, too, but a different kind: Richie in the hammock, legs sprawling, his skin warm from the sun. If Eddie moved forward just a couple of inches, he could completely cover Richie’s thighs with his, a kind of human sunscreen, a sun shield—and he did this to himself, he fucking _decided to sit down,_ but he still feels like punching somebody, he feels like knocking the stupid square nerd glasses off of Richie’s face and dragging him forward by his stupid hair and—

Eddie takes his shoes off. Not carefully like he usually does, right and then left, untie the laces and pull at the soles in slow, smooth motions and line them up against the wall so they’ll be out of the way, but rough—one yank on each side and two _thumps_ as he tosses the shoes against the wall. Riche’s face is close, stupid, round cheeks and a sharp nose, lips chapped from biting them probably and a mark just on the underside of his chin, the scab from a mosquito bite he got last week and couldn’t stop scratching at even though Eddie told him, Eddie _told _him you can’t make them go away like that. Eddie feels hot all over like a volcano, a real one, like the pictures of Hawaii forming in Stan’s _National Geographic,_ molten rock spilling up from under the earth and freezing as it hits the ocean. Steam still rising.

“I’ll do anything to get the hell out of Derry,” Richie says.

Eddie pushes his foot into Richie’s face: sock against skin, toes wriggling helplessly as Richie grabs his ankle and wrenches it out to the side. He wants to try again, knock Richie’s glasses off, make it so that he can’t see anything except the dark blue blur of Eddie’s T-shirt and the white-pink blur of Eddie’s face. He should always have socks on when he touches Richie, he thinks. Socks or gloves, or a full-body suit of armor like those knights in the Monty Python movie, the one that Richie quoted for weeks after they watched it even though Eddie told him, Eddie _told_ him he was going to stop talking to him if he shouted _Ni!_ in his ear one more time.

Eddie didn’t stop talking to him, of course. That would be another kind of torture, something deep and unbearable, like not having any classes together or losing a limb.

Richie grabs Eddie’s ankle again, skin against sock, yellow-pink against white-red-blue, and holds him still. He’s warm from the sun, Eddie can feel that even though the fabric, and his grip is loose enough that Eddie could wriggle out if he wanted to, could get out of the hammock and go sit on the bench or the ladder or the floor or anywhere else, but instead he takes a deep breath and settles there, reaches equilibrium, his toes a bookmark in Richie’s comic or a pillow for his head.

It takes Eddie three full hours to get to sleep that night. Some part of him—his liver maybe, or his spleen, or his heart—won’t stop running.

_August 2016_

He’s lying in the hammock when Eddie gets home.

It’s kind-of ridiculous, actually, that Richie even _has_—no, scratch that, it’s _fully fucking ridiculous_ that Richie even has a hammock to begin with, forty years old and living on his own in this sprawling L.A. suburb with miles of bleached-green grass between houses and stone mailboxes cut to match the cacti.

Or. Well. Not living on his own. Not anymore.

Eddie corrects his string of complaints but keeps it going, Richie forgot to water the begonias and now their leaves are drooping, how is he supposed to expect Eddie to agree to adopt a dog when he can’t even take care of an immobile organism, not to mention when would they have time to walk it between two full-time jobs and the fucking mess of divorce hearings Eddie’s conducting over Skype, not to mention _where_ would they walk it when the assholes out here drive like they’re trying to scratch marks into the pavement, God, at least in New York there were stoplights to keep maniacs in check and jaywalkers, he misses the jaywalkers, the ease of yelling at someone who couldn’t stay between two white lines and a blinking light.

Richie is in the hammock, lying on his back, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed. He looks like he’s taking a nap, which is fully ridiculous in itself—Richie is like a human Jägerbomb even on his slow days, always shouting or jumping or pushing at something, usually Eddie. The hammock is swinging slightly, the faintest oscillation, the curled ropes between two birch trees, and Richie’s got his shoes on, scuffed Converse sneakers with four-letter words scribbled on the heels in Sharpie. Sunlight falls quiet on his face, shading his skin in gold.

He’s got to say something about the begonias, Eddie tells himself, that’s why he goes up to the hammock, toes off his sandals in the grass, and sits down on the other end. His weight sinks the rope, enough that Richie’s side lurches suddenly to the left, dipping and sending his elbow to brush a dandelion poking out of the grass.

“What the hell, Eds,” Richie says, voice thick and slow like maybe he had been napping after all. “You trying to flip me? ‘Cause you know this thing is state of the art, rigged up by the best rope expert this side of Pasadena, like she does S&M workshops on the side, and…”

He keeps talking, running through some story about L.A.’s sexual underbelly that could be real or improvised or something in between, a joke he’s practicing for his next show, it doesn’t matter, what matters is the tone of his voice, low and familiar, and the way he grabs Eddie’s ankle in his left hand, holding him in place, skin against skin. His fingers are warm, and Eddie wants a full-body suit of armor or otherwise a quarry to dive into at dusk, something cool and clean to counteract the heat bubbling beneath his skin.

“Hey, Rich,” he says.

Richie pauses, rubs a light circle across Eddie’s ankle with his thumb. “Yeah?”

“Do you remember Ms. Fraser’s class, sixth grade? Volcanoes?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. “The—the baking soda and vinegar, right? We had to clean up the glass and then she made us sit—”

“Sit on opposite sides of the room. Yeah. It was torture.”

“Shit, I’d forgotten all about that.” Richie laughs, his head tilting back, his hair a tangle of dark brown against the white ropes. “You’d write down all the shit you were mad at me about and then go yell at me after class, like a director giving notes, only all your notes were like, _your face sucks and I hate it.”_

Eddie opens his mouth to protest, but then he remembers that, yeah, that was _exactly_ one of his notes, one day in April when Ms. Fraser went through a whole slideshow on the Amazon rainforest and he couldn’t stop staring at the line of Richie’s nose in the yellow light. He closes his eyes for a moment, picturing it—the pencil in his hand, his wrist locked tight, the way his stomach started to drop when he looked too long, and _fuck_ is this why he spent half of high school thinking he had indigestion—and then opens them.

Richie is looking at him. Eyes wide behind his glasses. There’s a pink spot on the tip of his nose, sunburn from the beach last week, when Richie forgot the umbrella and Eddie yelled about UV rays and melanoma until Richie scooped him up and ran, carrying him screaming into the surf.

“Fuck,” Eddie says. “How did we survive without each other for twenty years?”

Richie keeps looking at him, long and intent, like he’s trying to memorize the whole script of _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ or the pattern of freckles across the bridge of Eddie’s nose. His hold on Eddie’s ankle tightens, and he says, “I don’t think we did.”

And that’s just—well, it’s fucking ridiculous, is what it is.

Eddie lurches forward, going up on his knees in the center of the hammock, rope pressing into his skin through his jeans, and then he loses his balance and lands with both hands on Richie’s chest, elbows out, hammock swinging wildly, and if he stopped to run the numbers he’d say there should be a seventy-eight percent chance they spin a full one eighty degrees and knock their heads on the drought-starved California soil but they don’t. They don’t. They stay there, swinging, Richie grinning like he’s about to laugh, and as soon as he’s certain they won’t flip Eddie leans down and kisses him.

It’s getting easier, kissing Richie. Or it is and it isn’t—there’s less calculus behind it now certainly, no need to worry about angles and pressure because they’ve practiced this, in enough locations and weather conditions that Eddie is comfortable, isn’t vibrating quite so hard as he opens his mouth against Richie’s. But it’s still new every time, still all-consuming, a mess of warmth and friction. Richie’s hands come up to cup Eddie’s face, Eddie’s hands go down to brace against the hammock, and then somehow they’re rotating, both on their sides with the rope forming a loose cocoon around them.

“We can get a dog,” Eddie says after they pause to breathe, ducking his head, his voice muffled by Richie’s shirt. “Whatever kind of dog you want. Except not a really big one, or one of those ones that jumps up and licks you, but other than that I won’t be picky. I’ll even help take it on walks.”

Richie laughs, a long, honest laugh. Eddie feels it rumbling through his chest.

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Eds,” he says. And Eddie believes him.

**Author's Note:**

> baking soda and vinegar ["react with each other because they exchange atoms"](http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4147), hence the title.
> 
> I don't normally like to make promises in a/n's, but I did kinda write this in order to practice writing eddie's pov for a longer thing, so uh... [watch this space](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor).


End file.
